The New Pictures

The Black Knight (Warwick; Columbia), starring Alan Ladd and Patricia Medina, and photographed in Technicolor, is reviewed by TIME'S Camelot correspondent:

"Thynggs are tuffe here, ywis. Thre times in this dretched yere hath this our Fayr Demesne been sore aforbled of the hungrie bande that Slounketh out of the Woode called Holly. Nay, the Table Round hath more mouthes in this twelvemonth fedd than ever it didde the whiles Kyng Arthur supped him there. First comith that pritty knight Sir Robert, the Taylor yclept, and feigneth to bee Launcelot, and then harde after hym ye yongge esquirt Robert a Wagner, yt callith himselfe Prince Valiant.

"And nowe is al Reasoun disperplyd, for lo! ther rideth out of the Weste upon usse Sir Alaine the Ladd, whych is siccar the most onnatural knight that ever was my doole to see. Ho! Ho! For hee kann not gat his legs arounde a propre Hors, beeing knocken knee. Therfor muste an other ryde into battail in his stead, whiles hee sits pyght and pritty on a woodan tubbe ycovred in hors hyde, and doth preetende to make the onslaught--slishe! slashe!--a-straking o' the air on's Sworde, and a-brasting of's cheekes wi' greate shoutes wold fright, I trow, the Lice offe Launcelot.

"Nay, more, nor kann this knight e'en parler ye Englysshe langue, bot muttereth mayhappe in Frensshe, as, 'Yagottalissena me. Englans gonnabeen vaded.' Aye, say'st'ou, but when ye Ladd doth feutre him into Patricia's chambre for love's sake, aye, what then? What then bot shende and shame to the Table Round! for hee doth take Discretioun for ye bettre part of Valoure. O Fye!

"Wherfor have Sir Gawaine and his brethren sworne a greate vow to journee to the Holly Woode, and onloose the fayr Colhumbia, allso to slay the dreadfull dragoun Metr Ogol Dwynma Yer, and anie other of his breede yt they shal finde. Avaunt! eftsoons bee al mal engine full awroke!"

Black Widow (20th Century-Fox), based on a whodunit by Patrick Quentin, is really just a routine man hunt through Manhattan. However, Scripter-Director-Producer Nunnally Johnson takes the opportunity to give the customers some uptown lowdown, and he dishes it out with chill skill.

The dirt: a young girl (Peggy Ann Garner) comes to New York on the make to visit her uncle (Otto Kruger), and meets a famous Broadway producer (Van Heflin). Since Heflin's wife (Gene Tierney) is out of town, he rather indiscreetly lets the girl use their apartment to write in while he is at work. The day his wife gets home, they find the girl strung up in the bedroom and a suicide note on the typewriter table.

But the police (George Raft) discover that the girl did not commit suicide--she was murdered. Furthermore, she was pregnant. Things look bad for the producer. However, there is still the couple upstairs to be considered (Ginger Rogers and Reginald Gardiner) and the boy friend down in the Village (Skip Homeier). Producer Johnson manages very cleverly to keep all these oranges in the air until the next-to-last scene.

He is responsible for some other kinds of cleverness, too--notably a brilliant use of the narrative flashback. In one scene, Gardiner is telling Heflin about something that happened the week before. The sound track carries his voice as it speaks in the present, but the screen shows the past events he is describing. All at once, Gardiner is violently interrupted in the telling of his story. The spectator can hear what is going on from the sound track, but for a long instant he can see nothing but the image in the flashback that just sits on the screen and tantalizes the onlooker, whose senses are desperately straining to discover what it was that broke in on Gardiner's story.

When all at once the image from the flashback vanishes and the moviegoer in an instant is hurled from the past back into the present, he stares at the new scene dazedly and has all the sensations of a man rudely awakened from a dream. The effect is a wonderful simulation of startling interruption.

Illicit Interlude (Hakim Productions), a new Swedish dish, is a sort of half-baked Strindberger. This one is served up by Director Ingmar Bergman (no kin to Ingrid), who made the same sort of thing rather better in Torment (TIME, April 28, 1947) and in the film version of Strindberg's Miss Julie.

Interlude tells the story of a ballerina (May Britt) who gets stiff in the emotional joints, tries the hot-and-cold memory treatment: Ah, to think of the midsummer madness she knew with Henrik (Alf Kjellin) all those years ago! "Do you like wild strawberries?" she lilted, and she led him to a grassy marge where the fruit could be had for the plucking. "Sometimes," muttered Henrik, "I feel as if I were about to fall into a dark pit." "No, no," said she, "you mustn't speak like that," and she pushed him into the lake and laughed. She was his laughing girl. And when temptation was filled to the brim? Skoal!

Director Bergman has laid a pagan feast for the senses. The screen is laved with the light of those weird white nights of subarctic summer--when night never falls--as if in pale floods of akvavit, and the watcher gets a potent whiff of why the northmost races get soul-drunk on their annual binge of light. Actress Britt incarnadines the mood with hot blood.

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